Saturday, November 04, 2006

World First Aid Day

The night before September 10th, World First Aid Day, happened to be a Saturday… Clau stayed over and we spent a good number of hours making ribbons to hand out in exchange for a donation (we got a bit more than $20, woohoo!), preparing a poster explaining what we were fundraising for (our kickss HIV education and prevention project), and amidst all that we took a 3h break to go to MamaDiablo because the national rock band Deszaire was playing and they are brilliant. Didn’t get much sleep, but we got everything we wanted to get done done, and had a great time too.

On World First Aid Day (Sunday September 10th), the La Paz Red Cross set up shop on a section of El Prado, giving people the opportunity to do a crash course in First Aid in a little over an hour! Photo on left: the sign-up stand, with our fundraising poster and piggybank on the left... And that's Mauri in smurfwear, he was in charge of registration. The eleven stops were: Evaluating the Patient I and II (see photo below right to see what Oscar and Luisa look like when teaching this, hehe), vital signs, bandages, hemostasia, immobilization I and II, OVACE, CPR, transport, how to make a First Aid Kit, and a demo of how to extract a patient with possible spinal injury from a vehicle. I was in charge of the bandages’ stop, along with Jeannette and Henry. It was fun but a bit tiring because we gave Speedy Gonzalez classes to semi distracted people over and over and over again from 10.30am to 3pm – and at one point as I was in the middle of demonstrating how to do a vendaje en espiral, all of a sudden a TV camera was stuck in my face! Once again, I was on screen, woohoo!

Tia Alicia stopped by to say hi and then went to say hello to some of the members of the board of directors who were around, and as she was the La Paz Red Cross President right around when I was born, there was apparently a lot of hugging and reminiscing and even crying!